Mayor Clem Seifert visits pre-kindergartners at the New Beginning day care center Tuesday. Eric Williams was doing hard time. Trapped in a room that would make a jail cell look roomy, the Henderson city manager called on his friends to get him out of trouble. “I’m going to warn you upfront, I’m going to hit you up for a little money,” he told one phone-a-friend. “I’m trying to get myself out of jail at the moment.”

Vance County commissioners took the next step toward establishing the Kerr-Tar hub Monday night when they approved a nonbinding letter of intent and appointed Commissioner Danny Wright to represent the county in the nonprofit organization overseeing the project.

The city of Henderson doesn’t always have a lot to work with in its budget, but what it has it presents well. In what has become an annual event, Henderson is receiving the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award from the Government Finance Officers Association for the current fiscal year, which began July 1.

RALEIGH — For years, any gathering of North Carolina farmers was likely to focus on one word: buyout. But Congress passed, and President Bush signed, a quota buyout bill last year. So when Democratic Congressmen Bob Etheridge, Brad Miller and David Price held their annual Congressional Farmers Breakfast in the Jim Graham Building at the State Fairgrounds on Tuesday morning, it was another story. This time the farmers focused on change — and the buyout.

RALEIGH — There was nothing friendly about the election battle between Democratic incumbent Britt Cobb and Republican challenger Steve Troxler for agriculture commissioner last year. Cobb’s refusal to accept his close but clear defeat, by a margin that was smaller than the number of votes an electronic machine lost in one Republican-leaning county, resulted in a crazy series of decisions by the state Board of Elections and the courts. Another election, whether in one county or statewide, seemed to be …

As Andrea Harris introduced a guest panel of five businesspeople Saturday morning, most of the more than 50 people packed into a room at the Vance County Senior Center listened closely to what she had to say. The five people she was introducing were exceptions.

Five businesspeople offered advice from personal entrepreneurial experience at Saturday×?Ts Small Business Opportunities Forum. A brief roundup of their stories: * George Daye is the owner of Raemac Transportation, which has 13 vans to take people just about anywhere they need to go, whether it×?Ts down the street to see the doctor or up to Philadelphia to visit a dying brother. He retired from Harriet & Henderson Yarns in 1999 and wanted to drive a school bus because ×??I love …

Marty Gister, holding older son Andy, and Beth Gister, with 18-month-old Ryan, hope that the new 25-mph speed limit will make Granite Street safer. Beth and Marty Gister had to wait 11 months to win City Council approval of a lower speed limit on their block of Granite Street between Chestnut and Garnett streets. Once the council acted, the Gisters got results in less than 48 hours.

Don’t blame a Dabney Drive music store for the intimidating graphic making the rounds in South Henderson. That’s the word from a store employee on the job Friday afternoon at Big Katt, which is in a strip mall across the street from the Central Fire Station

One of the fun things about HomeinHenderson.com is that we don’t have to write an actual story every time we have something to share. We aren’t bound by the limits of a newspaper page or a radio show; we can just throw something interesting up on the Web. In that light, we present some information from Embassy Square Foundation Executive Director Kathy Powell in response to a few questions we had. Most of the questions were meant to clarify facts …

Tuesday night’s fatal shooting of a 22-year-old man in his South Henderson home produced calls from the Vance County Coalition Against Violence for law enforcement to do anything and everything to boost its presence on the streets of Flint Hill.